General Motors settles lawsuit over selling customer driving data

A two-year legal battle between General Motors and California prosecutors led by Attorney General Rob Bonta over the alleged misuse of customer driving data has ended, with GM agreeing to pay a $12.75 million fine.

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one in Press release announcing the agreementThe AG alleges that GM sold “the names, contact information, geolocation data and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians” to data brokers including Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions. And, as the statement notes, “If you know the exact location of a person’s car, you know an enormous amount of personal, sensitive information about that person – their home, work, children’s school, place of worship.”

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The basic facts of the case were exposed by the new York Times In 2024, where the focus was on whether insurance companies were using this driving data to charge some customers higher insurance rates. But the Attorney General’s investigation concluded that “California drivers were not directly affected by GM’s sale of the data,” because under California’s strict insurance laws, “insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates.”

In addition to the $12.75 million settlement, GM has agreed to prohibit selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, delete any existing driving data within 180 days (unless the driver has given explicit permission to keep the data), and develop and maintain its own privacy program to assess its data collection practices and mitigate the risks of a data breach.

While this settlement is certainly a win for consumer privacy, you shouldn’t feel too bad for GM. According to the Attorney General’s own calculations, GM made about $20 million from the sale of its OnStar data, so even after the hefty settlement, they’re still making a nice profit.